One-trick pony that goes on waaay too long

Rating: 6/10 (26 April 2014)

"Pacific Rim" is one thing and one thing only: giant robots punching giant monsters. This goes on for a shade over two hours.
Look, I totally get that this is a homage to the monster movies of an earlier era (movies that I enjoy too). And all the right ingredients are here. However, the end result felt to me like a cold paint-by-numbers exercise with a vast visual effects budget.
Fortunately, I don't think that del Toro ever fell into the trap of taking any of it seriously: there's a sense of sly fun that permeates the movie all the way through to a short scene embedded in the closing credits. However, this wasn't enough to save the movie for me, where a 25-minute, Saturday-morning-cartoon plot is expected to support a 130-minute feature film. To be honest, despite all the undeniably impressive visuals, I was horribly bored by the end.
To some degree, I think the ultra-realistic visuals worked against the movie. The basic premise of choosing to combat giant sea monsters by building giant robots to engage them hand-to-hand is of course ridiculous. That's not something that should matter in this particular genre: plausibility is very definitely not part of the fun. However, for me at least, the realism of the presentation seemed to demand a more realistic premise. It just seemed very weird to have such nonsense presented so highly naturalistically.
I mostly enjoyed "Pacific Rim" but was very glad when it was over. If you're after something completely brainless but spectacular, this might do the trick.